The artists write: “On this recording, we open up the complete original music set for the voice in Franz Schubert’s “Winter Journey” to the two wind instruments oboe and bassoon. We play Winterreise from an inner conviction – it draws us in and will not let us go. After we had played some of these Lieder at home for the first time, we could not resist them. We were seized by the ambition to arrange this setting with oboe, bassoon and piano, and make it as intensive and expressive a version of Winterreise as we could. We set out to show that the two instruments breathe, even sing, just as naturally as the human voice. The poetry of Wilhelm Müller should on no account be dismissed or disregarded for that reason. On the contrary, we rely on the subconscious recall of the sung words – by us and by our listeners – in order to bring out convincingly in instrumental sound the ideas inseparably associated by Franz Schubert with Wilhelm Müller’s poetic narrative. We were carried away by the euphoria of making this music, by the gloomy, despairing mood full of yearning and desire. Where such an emotional journey can lead is evident only when one has lived it every step of the way. We all belong to one family and yet in the past we had very little opportunity to make music together. Each one of us was harnessed to their own career path and it was seldom possible for us to come together as a group. The worldwide Corona crisis has suddenly jerked us to a kind of “emergency stop”. That has allowed us to grow together again as a family, not just physically but artistically too.”